Sex Trafficking Victims Rescued in Scotland

From the Daily Record:

Three women held as sex slaves in Scotland were bought for just £7000 - and forced to have sex with up to 20 men a day.

Human traffickers charged up to £60-a-time for sex with the victims, two Slovakians and a Lithuanian. The women have now been freed thanks to a massive police operation. They were among 17 sex slaves rescued during a series of raids across Scotland in the last few months. Last night, one senior officer said the slaves were being treated like "used cars".

"And just as cars depreciate, the value of a person can depreciate. " It's a horrible set of circumstances for people to find themselves in.

"This year is the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery and we are using that to draw attention to this problem. "Someone is making money from all this misery. Our job is to take appropriate action." Every police force in Scotland has been involved in the latest clampdown on human trafficking.

The recent raids took place as part of Operation Pentameter 2, a UK-wide effort to free women from the clutches of organised crime gangs who make millions from the sick trade every year. For operational reasons, police are unable to reveal details of the raids or of any arrests made. But they did confirm that cases of human trafficking are rising at a faster rate in Scotland than in the rest of the UK.

Mr Malcolm said yesterday: "People who are trafficked are coerced or abducted or maybe conned here on the promise of employment. "Usually, the first thing is their passport is taken off them and they are visited upon with violence. That violence can be sexual if people are going to be forced into prostitution."

The Glasgow sex industry alone is worth an estimated £7million a year, earned by women forced to work in saunas, in private flats and as escorts. Many are regularly sold and re-sold between organized criminals working in all of the UK's major cities.

Last year, the original Operation Pentameter resulted in 515 raids and 84 suspected victims of human trafficking being identified. A 14-year-old girl in Dumfries was the youngest person rescued.

A drop-in centre for sex industry workers in Glasgow recently launched special clinics for women who sell their bodies in saunas. They have women from more than 30 countries on their books.

Inspector Arlene Smith said: "They are now running clinics for these women three days a week and have registered women of 34 different nationalities. From Asia, China, Nigeria, Latvia - there's quite a mix."

Detective Chief Superintendent Corrigan believes the public can help as much as they did in providing tip-offs to police about cannabis farms. He said: "We'd like the public to report in if they see a couple of young women moving into a flat and notice an inordinate amount of people visiting. That gives us reason to visit." ACC Malcolm added: "In England, one man who had used the services of a girl went back to the house and actually rescued the girl and took her to police.

"We're trying to touch the consciences of these people - so they don't treat these girls like commodities.''

Read the full article

Brown University Professor Says Efforts to Reduce Human Trafficking Ineffective

From the University of Connecticut:

An international monitoring project designed to combat human trafficking is flawed, according to Brown University anthropology professor Kay Warren. Warren made her remarks during this year’s Robert G. Mead Jr. Lecture, held in the Student Union Theatre on Nov. 8. The lecture, on human trafficking around the world, was part of the University’s celebration of International Week.

Warren is the Charles B. Tillinghast Jr. ’62 Professor in International Studies at Brown, where she directs the Politics, Culture, and Identity Program at the Watson Institute for International Studies. She said a Trafficking in Persons program (TIP) was created by the U.S. State Department to measure countries’ levels of compliance with international norms in what are called TIP reports. However, she says, the TIP program lacks the measures needed for accurate results.

Any form of labor could be the subject of trafficking, she said, but “in practice, there has been a much narrower understanding of trafficking, which focuses mostly on women and children and sexual exploitation.”“The TIP reports are widely circulated four-tier rankings designed to reward those judged to be in full compliance and to sanction those that fail both to recognize human trafficking and to embrace the global discipline combating this transnational crime,” Warren said.

She said that countries take the protocol and “try to change it with another national, domestic agenda. The protocol actually morphs in this process. It might, for instance, take on a new identity as an anti-immigrant vehicle. “Even as these countries are trying to play with this imposition from the U.S. government, they also want high rankings,” she said. “Everyone wants to be a tier 1.”

She said the global estimate of 600,000 to 800,000 trafficking victims each year has been used in government reports as a measure of a global tragedy, but asked, “Where did those numbers come from? There was no methodology.”

She asked, “Is criminal disorder actually defeated by these anti-trafficking processes? It’s not clear to me. Anti-trafficking policies have had important effects on state policies through the legal system, but it’s unclear to me that they have had very effective consequences for transnational organized crime.”

Added Warren, “The issue is: Would there be another way to measure, and another kind of methodology, that one could develop that would target the criminals?”

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I know from my time in the Philippines that one groundbreaking trafficking case in a city called Zamboanga resulted in a conviction in a mere five months, which involved coordination between various criminal justice and law enforcement staff and just so happened to occur during the visit of a U.S. government official who was evaluating the country's anti-trafficking efforts. Realistically, it takes 2 to 5 years for a trafficking case to be disposed of. To date there have been 12 convictions (correct me if I'm wrong) since the Philippines Trafficking Act of 2003 was passed.

Although there are sincere efforts by individuals in the Philippine government to address trafficking, they are often mired by the institutional lack of political will and environment of corruption that prevails. What then ends up happening is just enough is done to "combat trafficking" to maintain the tier-2 standing but not enough to make a significant impact (for example the limited accomplishments of the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking).



What do you think?

How has the U.S. State Department's annual TIP report affected anti-trafficking practices in your country? Has the 4-tier system and potential economic sanctions motivated countries to put forth resources and sound strategies to combat trafficking or is there simply a lot of window dressing?

Operation Busts Trafficking Ring with Victims from Nigeria

Sorry for my hiatus. A bit of holiday traveling kept me from contributing as I should. Back to work! From the IHT:

Italian and Dutch authorities on Tuesday arrested dozens of Nigerians accused of smuggling their compatriots into Europe to work as prostitutes and drug traffickers, police said.

The police operation also uncovered that it called "serious adoption irregularities" in which Nigerian women living in Italy were apparently able to take infants from Nigerian orphanages and then sell them abroad, a police statement said.

Officials offered few details at a news conference, saying that they knew of only one case in which two children were taken from an orphanage and handed over to a prostitution "madam" in Italy. But officials said they believed it was a growing trade and that one aspect of the investigation would now focus on contacting Nigerian authorities to ensure that such illegal international adoptions end.

Overall, authorities carried out 66 arrest warrants early Tuesday, all but 15 of them in Italy...

The suspects in Italy are accused of mafia association, criminal association aimed at human trafficking, slavery, kidnapping, and international drug trafficking, police said.

Many of those arrested were prostitution madams, who pay thousands of euros for each new girl to be smuggled into the country, said Giovanni Conzo, an anti-mafia prosecutor in Naples where the Nigerian operation carried out much of its work.

Other young Nigerians were used as drug mules, paid about 3000 Euros per trip to swallow cocaine or heroin in condoms and transport it around Europe, he said.

As the article states, few details were released curtailing the variety of information available on the actual bust. The BBC mentioned that the gang's activities earned the organization hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Human and drug trafficking are two of the most lucrative international crimes, along with arms trafficking. The operation has been an on-going investigation and prosecution process with around 150 people arrested in the last year. This probably should have been more obvious, but something I found nonetheless interesting, the investigation has found that drug smuggling has been able to go low-cost due to the availability of low-cost travel (particularly air fare) in Europe.

The only thing in the article I didn't find encouraging was the statement made by Italian Interior Minister Giuliano Arnato, which alluded to the arrests being proof of a new slave trade growing in Europe, taking advantage of poor Nigerians. Only in the sense that awareness and reaction, is the problem new. In fact, some of the hits I got while trying to get more information on the arrests led to articles from as early as 2001 detailing the horror of Nigerian children trafficked into Europe in large numbers.

Making Noise, Inc. is a non-profit media group that focuses using communication to raise awareness about social justice issues in Africa. They run a small blog on their site dedicated to Nigerian sex-trafficking to Italy. The promo was not ok, but the information in the blog posts is interesting.

Probably the most informative source I found was an article from Migration Information Source, a project of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington DC, is an informational webpage with articles and statistics from every region of the world on migration issues. Their July 2005 paper on "Trafficking in Women from Nigeria to Europe," while limited in the scope of victims, provides the reader with information on the process of trafficking from Nigeria to Europe from start to finish, including the settings of Nigeria and Italy (push and pull factors), how the women are trafficked, the usual route of traffickers to Italy from Africa, how the criminal organization sustains itself, etc. I was very impressed and if the arrest prompts you to take a further look into the problem specifically dealing with Africa and Italy, I highly suggest this site.

Sex, Drugs & Guns in the Balkans

Ethnic Albanian rebels benefit from sex slavery

From MSNBC:

TIRANA, Albania - Organized crime syndicates in the Balkans, spawned when communism collapsed a decade ago, are thriving on illegal trade in drugs and sex slaves. The final destination for much of the goods and services is Western Europe. The trade, which yields billions of dollars each year, doesn’t just pay for the mansions and yachts of wealthy traffickers. It also has a political purpose — supporting the purchase of arms for Albanian rebels.

Nearly two years after NATO troops drove Serb forces from this region, rebels are believed to still be skimming profits from drug and sex slave trafficking to fund illegal arms purchases for ethnic Albanian rebel movements.This trafficking has allowed both the Kosovo Liberation Army in the southern Serbian province of Kosovo and the National Liberation Army in Macedonia to be outfitted with the latest in rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns, mortars, sniper rifles and night-vision goggles.

The rise of organized crime syndicates flourished following the collapse of the communist system and frontier controls throughout most of the Balkan peninsula, resulting in lawlessness and civil conflict. The traffickers are from every ethnic group in the region, and despite the bloody rivalries that have torn apart Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia, they work closely together.

In many areas they work with the complicity of police and customs officials. The U.S. State Department report on human rights for 2001 notes that “instances of corruption and involvement of police in trafficking in persons occurred on the local level. At least two law enforcement officials have been dismissed for accepting bribes from traffickers.”

Often these activities enjoy the protection of high-ranking politicians, who are generously bribed, according to regional law enforcement officials.

Corrupt judges and prosecutors also frequently help arrested criminals.

On April 18, the Albanian state security service acknowledged the problem, saying in a statement that a “dangerous aspect of the growing power of the criminal groups is their ability to establish links with individuals in the top state administration offices and with politicians.”

Read the full article

Pop Culture Combats Human Trafficking

From eKantipur.com:

Nepal-- Experts on Sunday said media and popular culture could play an instrumental role in combating human trafficking.

Speaking at a program organized by Rights of Individual for Social Empowerment (RISE) in association with United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC), in the capital, Gary Lewis, representative of UNODC in South Asia, asked media persons and artists to join hands in global efforts to curb human trafficking. "Voices of people, who are instantly recognized by all, will be greatly helpful in bringing this practice to an end," he added.

He also lauded the initiatives taken by the government in Nepal including ratification of anti-human trafficking protocol to curb this practice. Babita Basnet, president Sancharika Samuha, said a large number of girls in the country are forced to lead a hellish life after being trafficked. "A short visual and a song by popular artists with an anti-trafficking message could bring great change in attitude and thinking of people," she said.

Actress Sanchita Luitel said concerted effort from all stakeholders was essential to curb this crime against humanity. She said gender disparity and illiteracy among rural folks was fueling the problem in Nepal.

Punya Prasad Neupane, secretary at the Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare, said media could play the role of facilitator and be a means to create awareness among people.

Read the full article

With that in mind, check out part 1 of a 3 part MTV mini series about human trafficking hosted by Lucy Liu:



And let's not forget the single off my forthcoming album Beat Down Human Trafficking, which will be released via the soon-to-be completed official Human Trafficking Project website this spring:

J Nice feat. Meryl- Human Trafficking

Child Sex Tourism Prevalent in India

From the Times of India:

Child sex tourism is prevalent in many states of the country, the Lok Sabha was told on Friday.

The Women and Child Development Minister Renuka Chowdhury said in a written reply that studies conducted by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) and National Commission for Women (NCW) shows that in the name of pilgrim, heritage and coastal tourism, sexual exploitation of children is quite widespread.

The Minister said that government is planning to propose an amendment in the existing Immoral Traffic(Prevention) Act, 1956 providing stringent punishment for those involved in trafficking, including of children. Studies said that a lot of reports of human trafficking have come in from Maharastra, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal and Orissa.

The government is introducing a new scheme 'Integrated Programme for Street Children' for their rehabilitation. The target group for the scheme would be children without family ties and vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.

The Women and Child Development Ministry has also formulated another scheme 'Integrated Child Protection Scheme' which would be implemented in the 11th plan period for setting up of 'transitional shelter homes' in urban and semi-urban areas for the street children. A national website detailing the number of missing children will also be maintained under this scheme.

The Ministry is enhancing the number of Juvenile Justice Boards in a year to ensure smooth functioning of cases where minors are involved.

Sex Slaves, Human Trafficking ... in America?

From MSNBC:

In spring of 2004, Katya (not her real name), like thousands of other foreign exchange university students, was looking forward to the summer job placement that she and a friend had received in Virginia Beach, Va. When she and her friend Lena arrived at Dulles Airport after a long flight from Ukraine, they were relieved to be met by fellow countrymen who spoke Russian.

The two men, Alex Maksimenko and Michael Aronov, were holding signs with the girls’ names and greeted them by taking their bags and luggage. Charming and reassuring, Aronov informed the girls that they had been reassigned to a job in Detroit where they would waitress and perfect their English language skills.

The men drove Katya and Lena to the Greyhound bus station and gave them tickets to Detroit. Confused and exhausted, the girls had no reason to question the change of plans.

“When we got to the hotel in Detroit, everything changed,” says Katya. “They closed the door and sat us down on the couch, took our passports and papers and said, ‘You owe us big money for bringing you here.’ They gave us strip clothes and told us that we were going to be working at a strip club called Cheetahs.”

Shocked and scared, the two women were subjected to physical, mental and sexual abuse over the next year as they were forced to work 12-hour shifts stripping for local Detroit men’s clubs. According to immigration customs agent Angus Lowe, the men controlled the women through intimidation with guns and threats to hurt family members back home.

Katya and her friend are two of the estimated 17,000 young women and girls annually who are forced to work in the sex industry in the U.S. by organized criminals. “Chicago, Houston, St. Paul, Minnesota, these crimes are happening in every community in America big and small,” says Marcie Forman, director of investigations for ICE (Immigration Customs Enforcement). “We’re talking about money here. Millions of dollars, and these people don’t think about these women as human beings. They think of them as dollars and cents,” Forman says.

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